Computerized Photo Filing System May Be Too Organized

June 28, 1991|By Andy Grundberg.

Filing photographs has long been a nightmare, not only for me but for everyone I know. Recently I ventured into the depths of the basement of the old family mansion and discovered my father`s complete set of slides of our long-ago family vacations. After brushing off the dust and mold, I found batches and batches of marvelous old images.

If I had had a couple of days to browse, I could have found pictures of me in knickers, my sister wearing bermuda shorts and a circle pin, my brother in diapers. But alas, there was no magic button to press to make these images suddenly appear. The pictures were there, all right, but finding them was another matter.

If this sounds like a problem of the kind librarians face, you`re on the right track. Libraries are full of books, but they`re no use unless you can find exactly the one you want when you want it. In the old days the answer took the form of McBee cards: file cards with punched-out edges, which allowed you to stick a needle through a batch of them. If everything was catalogued correctly, when you lifted up the batch a handful of cards fell out, and these listed the books you were after.

McBee cards also worked for collections of photographs, but keeping up with the housekeeping chores was a problem. Enter the computer, technology`s answer for practically everything. Since computers can keep even extremely large lists of information organized and available, they`ve revolutionized the library business.

Computers also can help you keep track of your pictures, which is why there are at least a dozen different software packages on the market designed for photographers with too many images on their hands. Recently one called SuperSet arrived on my desk, so I loaded it onto my hard disk and gave it a spin.

SuperSet, a product of Rock Creek Software of Missoula, Mont., is designed mostly for pros who mail out a lot of stock images. Basically, you list pictures by their subject, date and distinguishing characteristics, and then assign them to a general category. The entered images can then be sorted by type or location, or simply grouped according to where you want to send them.

In terms of printing, SuperSet can give you slide labels, lists of images by category, and indexes. From my limited acquaintance (my sample program was held to 100 images, maximum) it all seems well thought out in terms of functions and capabilities. (Rock Creek Software can be reached at Box 7892, Missoula, Mont. 59807.)

But there`s a ``but.`` Like nearly all attempts to organize our lives via the computer, SuperSet suffers from an overactive set of instructions. I`m not talking about the manual, which is a model of friendly advice, but about the so-called menu screens that pop up with less than endearing frequency.

My first word-processing program was menu-guided, which was a blessing until I learned to use it.

After that, the menus just slowed me down. I solved the problem by erasing the menus from the computer`s memory; the rest of the program seemed to work fine after that.

SuperSet has no end of menus. From the main menu you can get to a photographs menu, a sets menu, a marketing menu, a utilities menu and so on. Once inside these menus, there are sub-menus lurking in the background.

The reason that I`m teeing off on menu-driven computer programs is that they end up taking more of your time than the old McBee card system. And if the reason you want to organize your pictures is to save time, why should you have to waste it first?